500Gb Raid

stokecity_m

stokecity_m

stokecity_m

Associate
Joined
31 Mar 2009
Posts
2,278
Location
Stoke-on-trent
Getting a Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB SATA-II 32MB HDD,

How much faster would it to get another one and set them up in Raid 0?

Would i beable to set this up in a new system i'm building?
 
it could be up to 100% faster or it could be slower, it depends on how random yiour acess is as the raid adds a slight latency, seqential reads can be up to 100% faster, the latency on random reads will be sightly higher
 
The latency increases are pretty negligible, especially relative to the increase in speed elsewhere. It'll be a lot quicker in raid 0, approaching twice the speed at everything except seeking which will take a very very little time longer.

Setting it up is very easy, worst case is xp needs a customised disk (very easy) or a floppy drive to install on a raid. Other operating systems wont flinch.

Be warned that with raid 0, if one drive dies all your data is gone. Fairly irrecoverably. So keep a back up, or try to avoid forming an attachment to the data on them. Raid 10 is just as quick but doesn't care if one or sometimes two drives fail, but will need four drives which also increases the odds of failure.

For fear of writing too much, I'll conclude that if you keep decent backups, definitely go with raid 0. If not, an ssd is a very good answer.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom